Legendary Father Made Presence Felt

October 25, 1998|By Reviewed by T.H. Watkins Washington Post Book Review Service

It's apparent from Reeve Lindbergh's touching memoir that Charles and Anne Lindbergh's children - there were five of them after the first, luckless baby - struggled under the domination of their legendary father.

``When he walked through the front door, everyone in the family knew it was time to settle down, to shape up, and to pay attention - especially to him,'' Reeve, the last-born, writes in Under a Wing, her loosely structured but often wry and compelling mosaic of life with father (and without, since he was gone much of the time).

Much of the book centers on her mother, still alive but racked now by the heartbreaking erosions of great age. The daughter, too, lost a son, and the connection binds the two women in grief.

When she reads her mother's diary entries about the kidnapping, Reeve writes in one of the book's most moving passages, ``I walk with her into Charles' nursery, and I look at his toys and his blankets, and I bury my face in his clothing. I am there with her completely, sixty-five years ago, and because of Jonny [Reeve's dead child), her lost baby is my baby too.''

Still, Under a Wing is suffused with the presence of Lindbergh the father. Her Lindbergh is a distant and mysterious figure (as he is in A. Scott Berg's book, in spite of the author's best efforts to penetrate his subject's emotional armor) but one given to moments of tenderness and physical affection that add a softness to the portrait.

But there is honesty and anguish here too, particularly in the epiphanic moment when Reeve listens for the first time to the tape recording of the infamous 1941 speech in which her father accused American Jews of warmongering.

``Do you have any idea what it feels like to be someone who loved you, and is left with this?'' she cries out to her long-dead father. ``How could you have done this to us? How could you have done this to me?''